


Trivia

by polyphaga



Category: Raw Time - Fandom, The 25th Ward: The Silver Case, シルバー事件 | The Silver Case
Genre: Canon Compliant, Existential Angst, Found Footage, Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-17 04:35:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29587320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/polyphaga/pseuds/polyphaga
Summary: June 26th, 1999: Outside a convenience store along the highway circling the 24th Ward, Kosuke Kurumizawa makes a long-distance call.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	Trivia

**Ward 24 – Area B3 – Apartment Complex**  
**June 26, 1999, Saturday**  
**3:56 PM - His Room**

It's a warm, cloudless Saturday afternoon in the 24th Ward but Austin, Texas is several hours behind; there it's almost 2 AM. Kosuke Kurumizawa has been using his nascent sense of externality to dip in and out of the ward's electronic networks, spying on the minutiae of human life like guessing what type of shitty processed snacks someone entering one of five nearby 7-Elevens would go for (he's reached a point of discerning with 99.9% accuracy) and keeping tabs on the quietly angry 26 year old tenant four doors over who goes about his miserable life as a cop then builds bombs in his apartment during the evenings. Unfortunately, his almost immediate sense was that these situations were already determined by their environment, that is, they would play themselves out as the ward's systems dictated. They were remarkably under control, and therefore painfully boring.

Like yoga, though, he's felt that the more he exercises this capability, the more defined and flexible it becomes; he can stretch further. He lays back and flows into international TV broadcasts like an acrobat bending down to touch their toes. Of course there's the thick outer layer of commercial broadcasts, leaning in the direction of the United States this content is, at the moment, a majority of crass, late night comedies and advertisements for increasingly pointless appliances. It's like gazing into a clear stream, though. At first, mentally, you're just regarding the water but when your focus shifts, you can reach down through it and pinch your fingers around an interesting pebble.

On a local access channel in Austin, Texas there's a goth girl sitting with a phone switchboard on her lap. She looks kind of like one of the Method Tank freaks Kurumizawa has become vaguely aware of in his observations, and so she catches his attention. Method Tank were, so far as he could tell, a bunch of people organizing around a millenarian view of a utopian Internet, a sort of higher organization of humanity that could be attained when the 'net could give everyone who was connected instant and perfect information. Kurumizawa only became aware of them after he had attained what they appeared to want for himself so, of course, they just seemed like a distasteful, irritating reflection of his younger self.

To illustrate, the girl on TV in Austin, Texas seemed to be experiencing the ass-end of their grand ideals. Every few seconds she would click switches on the box on and off and say the name of the show, “Raw Time,” presumably to get a caller's attention. Naturally, this process involved getting buffeted for minutes at a time by random voices breaking through the miracle of modern technology to call her crazy, ugly, stupid, a whore, to tell her to show her tits or ask if she had a clit piercing or if they could play more Slayer next time. She would click these voices in and out of existence, sometimes with a deadpan comment but it was largely a stream of aggression and banality that she received passively, uninterested. There was also a guy seated in the chair next to her who would sometimes attempt a retort to the most inappropriate callers but they were never as potent or as funny as when the girl's finger flicked off one of the switches with an abrupt “click.”

You open yourself up to total communication, to total information, and all you get is the instant realization of how much of it is shit. The only fun is being able to turn it off. If only he'd known that...

Kurumizawa raises himself up onto his elbows, experimentally, seeing if he can move around and still keep the broadcast in his mind. He clings to it as he stands up, slides some cheap plastic sandals onto his bare feet, and walks out of his apartment.

The apartment building he stayed in was a cheap one on the very edge of the ward's residential areas. If you pulled out of the parking lot, you were almost immediately on the Circle Route Freeway, which made it a convenient location for low-paid, harried commuters but also kind of noisy and barren. The other side of the freeway, if you crossed its multiple lanes, was mostly empty lots and rarely-attended bus stops, but there was also a lone 7-Eleven, with a phone booth outside.

Kurumizawa walks across the highway, focused on the phone booth. Fortunately, there's no one using it. It would be surprising if there was. He turns and squints down the road before crossing another lane. The sun is bright and the paved road is absorbing all of the heat, making the horizon look wavy and distant. He can feel the warmth radiating through his flimsy sandals but also clinging to his clothes, just a t-shirt and shorts. The clothes were hanging off of his body, he hadn't gone shopping for a while and often forgot to eat lately, but they were still sticking to spots where sweat was beginning to emerge. As time wears on, he thinks to himself, no matter how simply he lives or dresses, the pure mechanical upkeep and obligations of his body will become more and more irritating.

Inside the phone booth, he cradles the receiver against his shoulder and begins rapidly and automatically punching in numbers. It's a cryptic series of digits that only a few living humans could understand, but it's encoded into the phone system as a way to pose as a telephone company worker and make a long distance call without being charged, so he just knows it. Kurumizawa also goes through the trouble of cloaking the number so it appears to be from a local area code (which, too, he just knows). That way, they'll be more likely to pick up. The entire time, the broadcast plays on in the back of his mind. Connection, but he's on hold. He waits, listening.

“Raw Time.”

“Hey... How you doin?”

“Pretty good, how're you.” The girl on the TV says each word long and slightly loud like talking to a distant relative with mild dementia. She's funny, he thinks.

“Hey I'm alright.”

“That's good.”

“Hey... can I stick my nine inch dick in--”

Click. The girl frowns, flicking the switch off. Her co-host cuts in.

“Well, if you had nine inches we might--”

There's a crunch of feedback at his ear, and then he hears the girl's voice both in his ear and in his head.

“Raw Time.”

The words come out of him perfectly, in calm, unaccented English. Of course they do, because he just knows how. He thinks of all the other callers, a parade of low-class accents and nervous stutters. He wouldn't know what it was like any more, he realizes, for your mind or body to betray you in a way that tied you to a certain place, or revealed something about you.

“I'd like a trivia question please.” Kurumizawa listens back to himself on the broadcast a second later. He sounds a bit fuzzy, like he may be calling from far away, but given the strange calls the hosts tended to put up with they didn't seem to notice. Maybe there was some static, or the sound of cars rushing by in the background, but it was faint. His voice was clear.

The girl's co-host is instantly game.

“Alright let's see... Well, uh, what category do you want?”

“I like Geography, it's ok.”

“Geography... We'll start with capitals. You have capitals for 100-- The capital of Delaware, please.”

“Dover.” Despite the co-host drawing the question out, his answer is instant.

“You are good! Damn you are good.”

“Thanks, give me some more.”

“You want more capitals?”

“Sure.” He can feel a bead of frustration growing in him. It's not like the guy was stupid, or going particularly slow. This was just a normal conversation, and it would never be fast enough again.

“Uh... Capital of Florida?”

“Tallahassee.”

“You're on! Two for two. Capital of... Georgia?”

Self-consciously, even though his intuition told him that Georgia had one of the more obvious state capitals when the name was delivered to him, Kurumizawa pauses. Maybe a part of him still wanted to pass, for present, for normal. It almost comes out with a question mark.

“...Atlanta.”

“Good, three for three!” The co-host is just as impressed. Pointless. “And New York?”

“Albany.”

“Four for four. Vermont?”

“Montpelier.” The girl is looking down at the switchboard in her lap, laughing a bit. It's not that impressive, but probably a break from the past string of calls.

“You are excellent! Five for five! Do you want to go for six for six?”

“Why the hell not.” As he says it, Kurumizawa notices that the girl seems to want to cut in.

“Another category,” she says.

“Go ahead, another category. You pick something,” the co-host replies.

“No, I'm just telling you change category.” She seems slightly annoyed, maybe cynical about the ability to just repeat information. Kurumizawa assumes to himself that she thinks he is just reading it out of a book or even a website listing US capitals, rather than actually remembering, which he may as well have been. It bored her. Maybe if there was some other way to communicate, rather than in this chaotic public spectacle, she would be the kind of person who would be interesting to talk to. When more people had the internet, this game would be obsolete, anyone could access any information instantly. Nothing would be marginal, unusual, interesting or impressive to remember. Of course. If everything was trivia then also nothing was trivia.

“Oh, you're just telling me to change the category?”

He's so bored.

“This sucks.” Kurumizawa breathes it into the receiver and then slams it down with a clunk.

This sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks

He doesn't bother staying connected to the broadcast to gauge their reaction. He has to cross the freeway to get back to his apartment building and for a moment he's so bored he thinks of just letting a car mow him down instead. But the thing that's so horrible about it is rather than an accident or even a moment of impulsive mindlessness or despair killing himself could only ever be entirely deliberate. As soon as he starts thinking of the highway, of crossing it, he has an intuitive awareness of where every approaching car is; as soon as the idea of throwing himself in front of a car passes through his mind he can also see every gruesome outcome, sorted by velocity, type of car, severity of injuries, speed of death...

He crosses the highway without incident. Back in his apartment, he kicks off his sandals by the door and then sits in the middle of the floor again.

He's so bored. He wished he could say it was making him crazy, because that might be interesting or at least give him some delusion to cling onto. All he felt was deeply rational, deeply normal, with everything sliding in and out of his brain like fried eggs across teflon. Maybe this was the crazy response.

He closes his eyes, regulates his breathing, feels his body against the bare floor. One thing he has found unexpected and valuable about this state is a deeper sympathy for pyromaniacs and alcoholics. He feels like he better understands the nature of addictions that cause people to cling to such repulsive things. It's awful, but once you've done it you realize it's the only thing _to_ do in such a shithole. Kosuke Kurumizawa breathes in, and then reaches into the stream again.

**Author's Note:**

> https://youtu.be/anX2_UyOELY


End file.
